Streetscapes/AT&T Headquarters at 195 Broadway; A Bellwether Building Where History Was Made

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY

Published: April 23, 2000

WE didn't find anything that was in keeping with its history,'' said John Heath, a spokesman for AT&T, explaining its decision, which became known last week, not to move its signature Golden Boy statue back to Manhattan.

The possibility of a park had been suggested -- and vigorously endorsed -- by Parks Commissioner Henry J. Stern. Other possibilities were Golden Boy's original location atop the old AT&T Building at 195 Broadway or at the city-owned building at 346 Broadway, the former New York Life Insurance Building. But AT&T decided to leave Golden Boy where he now is, in front of its operational headquarters in Basking Ridge, N.J.

Mr. Heath said that AT&T never seriously considered the pyramid on which the sculpture originally stood at 195 Broadway. For Peter S. Kalikow, the developer who bought building from AT&T in 1983, it will always be the missing element in a $3 million restoration. ''I still want to put Golden Boy back,'' he said.

The statue was created under the aegis of Theodore N. Vail, AT&T's president who was something of a golden boy himself. He learned telegraphy is his early 20's, first at Western Union and then at the Union Pacific Railroad, where he rose quickly by making striking improvements in fast mail service. When Vail became the general manager of the nascent Bell Telephone Company, he moved it to New York and extended its reach into long distance and telephone manufacturing, organizing the American Telephone and Telegraph Company to oversee its growing empire.

Vail became the president of AT&T in 1907 and of Western Union in 1909, when AT&T acquired it, promising important economies of scale. To house this new enterprise, Vail planned a new 29-story headquarters at 195 Broadway in 1912, to be built in two parts along the full blockfront from Dey to Fulton Streets.

The first part, at the Dey Street corner with an L-shaped wing connecting to Fulton Street, was not completed until 1916. So in 1915, when Alexander Graham Bell completed the first cross-country telephone call, he had to do it from another telephone company building on the south side of Dey Street. In that call, Bell repeated his famous words of 1876 -- ''Mr. Watson, come here, I want you'' -- to Thomas A. Watson in San Francisco.

WHILE the building was going up, AT&T spun off Western Union in 1913, amid antitrust allegations. About this time, AT&T had commissioned Evelyn Beatrice Longman, a sculptor, to design an appropriate statue for its new building. The statue was a 24-foot winged male figure in gilded bronze, standing atop a globe, encircled by cables and holding electric bolts in one hand. She called the finished work ''Genius of Telegraphy.''

By the time it was installed on the stepped pyramidal top of the Fulton Street wing of the AT&T Building in 1916, however, Western Union was gone, and the statue was renamed ''Genius of Electricity.'' The official name was changed once more, in the 1930's, to ''Spirit of Communication,'' reflecting the company's evolution. But it was the Golden Boy nickname that stuck.

World War I delayed the Fulton Street half of the AT&T Building, which was finally completed in 1922. It presented a massive neo-Classical rebuke to the Beaux-Arts froufrou of earlier downtown skyscrapers. Layer upon layer of Doric and Ionic columns in cool gray granite rose up like an ancient monument. Welles Bosworth, its architect, designed the lobby as a forest of 43 giant marble columns, notable in their Doric simplicity, one of the great commercial interiors of the city.

American Architect magazine noted that this emphasis on simplicity extended to the smallest details: ''There are no manufacturers' names to be seen anywhere in the building, not even in the elevators. It is a relief to the tired brain, not to be forced to read lettering on all the fixtures, as has been so universally customary in this country. One sees no name placarded on the exterior of this building. It needs none.''

Mr. Bosworth worked extensively for the Rockefeller family -- he designed Kykuit, their Westchester estate -- and in 1924 moved to France to supervise the Rockefeller-financed restoration of Versailles.

Although the first cross-country call was placed from another building, the first trans-Atlantic call, to London in 1927, was made from 195 Broadway, said Dr. Sheldon Hochheiser, AT&T's corporate historian.

In 1980, the Landmarks Preservation Commission proposed the lobby of 195 Broadway for landmark designation, although it never acted. In 1983, AT&T moved to new headquarters at Madison Avenue and 55th Street and installed Golden Boy at the entrance. In 1992, when AT&T leased the building to Sony, Golden Boy was moved to Basking Ridge.

Photos: The first half of the AT&T Building was completed in 1916. The L-shaped building, at left in 1920, began at Broadway and Dey Street and wrapped around to Fulton Street. Golden Boy atop his globe in 1920, above. The building, finished in 1922, as it looks today, right. All that remains of the original statue, formally the ''Spirit of Communication,'' is the pyramid on which it once stood. (Office for Metropolitan History; Avery Library; Frances Roberts for The New York Times)